French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (43 page)

his deplorable homonym
: Richepin is presumably referring to the prolific and mediocre poetess Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulières (1638–94), who rose to prominence in the literary circles around Louis XIV.

Tertullian … De cultu foeminarum
: Tertullian (
c
.160–225), a Father of the Church, sometimes credited as the founder of western theology. His
De cultu foeminarum
(‘On Female Fashion’) is a tract counselling Christian women to dress modestly and without ornament.

the Widow
: i.e.
La Veuve
, historical French
argot
for the Guillotine, as in ‘my father married the Widow’ (Victor Hugo,
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
).

He was … page-boy style
: the last two lines are elliptical: ‘Il avait trouvé l’
imprévu
de la guillotine. Il s’était fait couper la tête
aux enfants d’Edouard
.’ The phrase
aux enfants d’Edouard
refers to the sons of Edward IV of England, the ‘Princes in the Tower’, who were later portrayed with the famous ‘page-boy’ haircut.

[title]: I have retained the original French title; its meaningless yet suggestive syllables work equally well in English.

‘At the Death-Bed’ was first published under the pseudonym Maufrigneuse in the review
Gil Blas
, 30 January 1883, and collected in Guy de Maupassant,
Oeuvres complètes
, vol 28,
Oeuvres posthumes
(Paris: L. Conard, 1908–10); ‘A Walk’ in
Yvette
(Paris: Victor Havard, 1885); ‘The Tresses’ in
Toine
(Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1884); ‘Night’ in
Clair de lune
(Paris: Ollendorff, 1888).

‘Rolla’
: the long poem by Alfred de Musset (1810–57) recounting events in the life of the famous rake Jacques Rolla, and showing up the life of prostitutes and the poor. In this poem of 1833 Musset seems to deplore the libertinism ushered in by
philosophes
like Voltaire, which in turn casts an oblique light on the greater debunking of romantic love carried out by Schopenhauer.

vestiges of his thought
: Maupassant is surely giving his own estimate of Schopenhauer’s devastating influence, and he himself underwent it. But there is an element of mockery in the black humour of this tale, directed at those for whom the philosopher had become the object of a cult.

the model employee that he was
: compare Mirbeau’s treatment of the same theme, in ‘The First Emotion’, above.

Quand le bois reverdit
: roughly translatable as:
When the woods are green again | My lover says to me | Come and take the air, my love | Under the greenwood tree
.

the flâneur
: literally, the ‘stroller’ or the ‘saunterer’. In nineteenth-century Paris the type took on an exemplary literary pedigree, thanks largely to the thought and work of Charles Baudelaire, where the
flâneur
becomes emblematic of a certain type of modern, urban experience.

Dictes-moy où … d’antan?
: two stanzas from the ‘Ballade des Dames du temps jadis’ (the ‘Ballad for Ladies of Times Past’), part of François Villon’s poem
Le Testament
:

Now tell me where has Flora gone,
The lovely Roman, her country’s where?
Archipiades, Thaïs that shone,
Her cousin once removed? And fair
Echo speaking across the air
Of pools and meadows where sounds go,
Her beauty more than human share:
Where is the drift of last year’s snow?
(…)
Where’s queen Blanche, like lily, swan –
With siren voice she’d sing an air?
Big-footed Bertha, Beatrice gone;
Alice, and Arembourg, Maine’s heir;
Lorraine’s good Joan, in Rouen square
Burnt by the English. Where d’they go,
O Queen and Virgin, tell me where,
Where is the drift of last year’s snow?

From François Villon,
Poems
, trans. Peter Dale (London: Anvil, 2001), 75.

Sergeant Bertrand
: François Bertrand disinterred corpses to assuage his sexual appetites; after a much-publicized trial he was sentenced in 1849, and since then his name has been associated with necrophilia.

Les Halles
: at this period the great central wholesale market of the city, celebrated by Zola as ‘the belly of Paris’. The market was demolished in 1971, replaced by the Forum des Halles, a modern shopping precinct.

This story was collected in
Le Coeur et l’esprit
(Paris: Charpentier, 1894).

the Parc Monceau
: the luxurious quarter of Paris in the seventeenth
arrondissement
that developed throughout the nineteenth century. It was home to many art-collectors, among them the Rothschild, Cernuschi, and Ephrussi families.

Villa Médicis
: the splendid Villa in Rome, on the Pincio, just above the Spanish Steps. It was purchased by Napoleon for the French state in 1801. To this day the Médicis receives artists-in-residence, winners of the ‘prix de Rome’, for periods of up to three years.

drawn direct from nature
: it is impossible not to think that Geffroy had in mind Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) as part of the inspiration behind this
story, and perhaps it was his works that so troubled the sculptor here. Rodin was celebrated for his exact anatomical imitation of nature, both in his sculpture and his drawings.

‘The Man Who Loved Consumptives’ was collected in
Sonyeuse. Soirs de Province. Soirs de Paris
(Paris: Charpentier, 1891). ‘An Unidentified Crime’, ‘The Student’s Tale’, and ‘The Man with the Bracelet’ were collected in
Histoires de masques
(Paris: Ollendorff, 1900).

Mardi Gras
: Lorrain is referring here to the ‘Carnaval de Paris’, a huge and joyous ceremony, held around Shrove Tuesday, involving masks and disguise, whose origins date back to the Middle Ages. In the 1890s it reached something of a climax, with the invention of confetti and the paper streamer. The Carnival fell out of the popular calendar in the 1950s, and despite various efforts to do so, has never been successfully revived.

nervous troubles
: Lorrain was a self-confessed ether addict, so much of this description can be taken as autobiographical.

Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel
: the first line of Baudelaire’s poem ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’ (‘Evening Twilight’) from
Les Fleurs du mal
. ‘Here is the delightful evening, the criminal’s friend’ (trans. Francis Scarfe).

pognon … rousse
: French criminal slang or
argot
. Equivalents in English might be ‘dough’ (as in money) and ‘the cops’.

smiling head of Scylla
: in the original Greek legend, the sea-monster Scylla was supposed to have had six heads, and a ring of barking dogs around her belly. Along with the whirlpool Charybdis, she guarded the Straits of Messina, and devoured the sailors who escaped the whirlpool.

Banville … ‘You Will Return’
: Théodore de Banville (1823–91), poet and prose-writer, admired by Baudelaire. The story referred to here by Lorrain has never been identified.

Je vois un port rempli … vague marine
: from Baudelaire’s ‘Parfum exotique’ in
Les Fleurs du mal
. ‘I see a port all filled with sails and masts that ache still from the briny wave’ (trans. Francis Scarfe).

Hôtel Pimodan
: formerly the Hôtel de Lauzun on the Île Saint Louis. Baron Jérôme Pichon acquired it in 1842, and welcomed poets and artists as lodgers (including Gautier and Baudelaire). The famous ‘club des haschichins’, described by Baudelaire in
Les Paradis artificiels
(1860), was founded in 1845 by the painter Émile Brissard.

Ah! malheur à celui … gauche!
: lines taken from Musset’s poem ‘La Coupe et les lèvres’ (‘The Cup and the Lips’, 1832). Literally: ‘Woe to him who lets debauchery | Plant herself like a nail in his left breast.’

Canler’s Memoirs
: Louis Canler (1797–1865) was head of La Sûreté (the Criminal Investigation Department). His
Memoirs
were published in 1862.

Wagram dance-hall
: the celebrated
Bal Wagram
, built in 1812. It became a
café-concert
and its large ballroom was often used for political meetings.

Legendre’s Play
: actually Shakespeare’s
Much Ado About Nothing
, in the translation by Louis Legendre, whose ‘adaptations’ of Shakespeare were in vogue among theatregoers in the 1880s.

Garde ta fille, elle est trop chère!
: ‘Keep your daughter, she is too expensive!’ The expression does not occur in the original. Legendre must be adapting Claudio’s lines, ‘There Leonato, take her back again, | Give not this rotten Orange to your friend’ (IV. i).

Roybet … Ziem … Porel
: Ferdinand Roybet (1840–1920), fashionable society painter of the period, specializing in portraiture and depicting theatrical costume; Félix Ziem (1821–1911), watercolourist and traveller, famous for his paintings of Venice and the East; Paul Porel (1843–1917), actor and man of the theatre. He became Director of the Théâtre de l’Odéon where the performance of Shakespeare’s
Much Ado
in Legendre’s adaptation, described by Lorrain here, was staged in 1886.

The Saint-Ouen horror crime
: a woman under the name of Valentine Dolbeau was found strangled on a deserted road near Saint-Ouen. The culprits were identified, a woman and her two lovers. The former, whose real name was Pauline Siller, had adopted the name Valentine Dolbeau, until the real Valentine Dolbeau became a danger, and so they did away with her. Account taken from
Le Progrès illustré
, 27 Nov. 1892.

First collected in
LeRouet des brumes: contes posthumes
(Paris: Ollendorf, 1901).

without an idée fixe
: compare Van Hulst’s obsession with collecting time-pieces with a similar fixation, differently placed, in Maupassant’s ‘The Tresses’ above.

rue de L’Âneaveugle
: ‘Blind Donkey Street’. Rodenbach evidently relishes the picturesque street-names of Bruges, which add to the element of fairy-tale in the story.

Godeliève
: by choosing this name Rodenbach further charges his story with medieval legend. Born near Bruges, St Godeliève (
c
.1049–70), patroness of unhappy spouses, especially of women abused by their
husbands, was a beautiful girl who desired to become a nun. Feeling obliged to marry, for the sake of her parents, she suffered torments at the hands of her spouse, one Bertolf, who in the end had her strangled and thrown into a well. He consequently repented and entered a monastery near Rome. Godeliève was known to be highly gifted with needle and thread, a trait Rodenbach retains in his story, along with her saintly, ascetic appearance and her apparently ‘immortal longings’.

Memling Madonna
: Hans Memling (
c
.1430–94), German-born painter who moved to Flanders. He is thought to have resided in Bruges in 1473.

All four stories were collected in
Histoires magiques et autres récits
(Paris: Mercure de France, 1894).

[title]: Gourmont’s allusion here is clearly to the Danae of Greek mythology, a princess of Argos, who was impregnated by Zeus when he visited her in the form of a shower of gold.

Arlette … Robert le Diable
: the mother and father of William the Conqueror, also known as William the Bastard, since Robert le Magnifique (called Le Diable) kept Arlette as his concubine and never married her.

with a pointed beard
: the appearance and behaviour of Gourmont’s faun here resembles the satyr of Félicien Rops, in his etching ‘Satyriasis’.

[epigraph]: ‘such things are vain dreams’; the expression is also to be found in Lucretius’
De Rerum Natura
.

the gallows name
:
fourches patibulaires
was the name given to the gibbets that were once a familiar sight in the French countryside.

German metaphysicals
: among them, most probably, Schopenhauer, who proposed a neo-Buddhist form of detachment in the face of absurdity and desire.

The story was collected in the posthumous publication of Laforgue’s
Moralités légendaires
(Paris: Éditions de la
Revue Indépendante
, 1887).

[title]: in Greek mythology, Andromeda was chained to a rock to assuage the fury of Poseidon, aroused by the hubris of Andromeda’s mother Cassiopeia. The sea-monster Cetus kept guard over her. Returning from slaying the Gorgon Medusa, Perseus slew Cetus and rescued Andromeda, and then married her. Andromeda was placed among the constellations, alongside Perseus and Cassiopeia.

ineffable fit of the sulks
: the monotonous island is really a physical analogy for Schopenhauer’s absurd universe. Laforgue was a devoted student of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

how bored I am!
: Andromeda’s bored, disenchanted, and yet histrionic tone here is typical of Laforgue’s persona in many of the
Moralités légendaires
and the poems that make up
Les Complaintes
. It is an ironic variant of Baudelairean
spleen
.

daughter of the king of Ethiopia
: Andromeda was a princess of Ethiopia, her mother, Cassiopeia, was queen.